Patrick Stoner welcomes your questions about movies and the people who make them. Send your questions to pstoner@whyy.org. Here's the current question and answer:
Q: Disaster movies (or, as Hollywood like to call them these days, "event films") are in vogue. Are there some good older ones to rent?
A: Not many.
The operative word in this question is "good." Disaster films tend to be cheesy, with obvious special effects, no characters worth watching, and about as predictable as it's possible to be. Recently, the revolution in digital effects have made them more interesting visually, but they're still empty calories.
Still, since it seems to be the fashion now, here's a walk down the memory lane of quakes, floods, crashes, storms and fires. Enjoy.
Once you've run out of these, you can look forward to the upcoming movie THE FLOOD. I visited the set -- if you can call a jumbo hanger in the middle of the California desert with a tank containing millions of gallons of water a "set." It was impressive seeing an exact replica of a real Midwestern town submerged in water for as far as the eye could see while artificial rain poured. For all of their drawbacks, it was a reminder that disaster films are enormous cinematic undertakings. In a world where businesses and governments are downsizing, it's interesting that Hollywood still stages "event films" on a grand scale.
- Airplane (a spoof)
- Airport
- Alive
- Avalanche
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
- Cassandra Crossing
- China Syndrome
- Earthquake
- Fearless
- Flood!
- Hindenburg
- Hurricane
- Juggernaut
- Krakatoa, East of Java
- The Last Days of Pompeii
- Lifeboat
- The Medusa Touch
- The Meteor
- No Highway in the Sky
- The Poseidon Adventure
- The Rains Came
- Runaway Train
- San Francisco
- Survive
- The Swarm
- Titantic
- The Towering Inferno
- When Time Ran Out
Past questions and answers.
